Fast, Efficient Content Production

In this episode, we discuss how a few clients are using Shortcut Blogging as a content production tool in ways that we didn’t even really envision. It got us thinking about some other ways to use this method and we wanted to share them.

First, we have a client that is putting on an event in August and needed nearly 20 pages of content written to promote it. The challenging part is that this content can only be written by the experts that they have inside their company, and none of them have time to sit down and write all this content. So, what they’re doing is basically telescoping of a four-month engagement with Shortcut Blogging. They’re using our eMarketer service and producing 4 months of content in about 2 weeks.

Over the course of four months we would typically produce about 18 weekly editions, articles, podcasts, however you want to re-purpose them. If you do the math, you’ll have 13 weeks in one quarter and we’re throwing in an extra episode to round it out to 18 for the price of 4 months.

So, instead of those experts having to sit down and write 18 pages, all they really have to do is go through the brainstorming process, our outlining process, figure out what those pages are about and then we’re doing 4 hour-long recording sessions with 4 of their executives. Each executive will cover 4 or 5 topics in their session.

And finally, we’ll have the recordings transcribed and rewritten as web content for their website so they can get their event site up and running.

It’s an ingenious way of creating content for a website for communicating and enticing people to come to this event. They can also take that content and transform it into newsletters or other promotional content. It’s just one of the foundational techniques you can use with this content.

You have to have the content though before you can re-purpose anything. That’s the important thing.

We’ve been brainstorming about other ways to re-purpose and other ways to use Shortcut Blogging to create content. Why not web page content? Instead of multiple rounds with a copywriter, just outline the page and do an interview with the owner of the company and run it through our process

Consider the time involved. If you’re a busy CEO and you’ve got to sit down and write 20 pages of content for your web site, that’s a big task…unless it’s something that you just have at the top of your head and you’re just a whiz at banging out content on the keyboard.

If you use our approach it will take that executive a grand total of about four hours. If it’s just the one person, his only involvement is going to be about four hours, probably spread over several days. It just depends on the urgency, but really four hours with the executive and then give us a week or two to get the finished product out. That’s going to be about it.

And, they don’t have to worry about proofreading. Our editors will take care of that and we guarantee they’ll get it right.

Here’s another little twist on our technique. We’ve been talking with a health care organization. Imagine you’ve got half dozen different doctors that you want to get involved in creating content for a blog or a website and you want them to rotate so that it’s not the same doctor every week for a month. It may be hard to get them all in the room so that one can do one interview and one can do the next topic and one can do the next.

There are a couple of different ways you could do it so they rotate. You could prepay for maybe four or five months worth and then we would do all the interviews for those months, for the term of the, whatever the prepayment was.

So, if you prepaid five months and you had five doctors that you wanted to do interviews. So doctor one could come in and do his session. Doctor two can come in and do her session. And then, what we would do is we would have all of those pieces of content produced at the same time. Now you can basically shuffled the deck so that doctor one’s podcast runs this week, doctors twos first podcast runs next week, doctor three is the week after. So, they rotate positions in there but they were all recorded, all produced up front.

That’s one way of doing it. Another way would just be to do multiple editions of our service. So, we do one contract for doctor A, another contract for doctor B and so on. And doctor A’s contract goes up on Mondays, doctor B’s goes up on Thursdays. Everybody owns their own day that way.

Those are the kinds of things that we can do that can be a little creative, be a little flexible in getting an entire team of experts on your blog or on your website. As opposed to one person this month and we do four or five with that one, then bring in another one. In terms of a visitor to your site or to your blog, it makes you look like a seriously big organization.

Once again, it comes down to the time factor. In that first instance, if we had five doctors in one, hospital or a practice or whatever and at the beginning of the engagement we did all five recording sessions. That means that each of those doctors needs to give us an hour. You can have five or six months worth of blogging and fresh content on your website.

This way, each of those experts, those doctors needs to sit down at a microphone for one hour, twice a year. As opposed to going to them and saying, “We need you to write a weekly or monthly article,” and now it’s just hanging over their heads.

My sister’s a doctor. She gets done with dinner with her kids and then it’s off to write and dictate notes for patient files. That’s what she does until bedtime. She’s really a very good writer, she loves to write but she can’t, she doesn’t have time. She doesn’t have time to do her doctoring work, let alone extra writing to help market the practice.

So, whether you’re a law firm, a doctors office, a hospital, a college, or whatever, this can help you get good expert-level content out there. We talked a couple of weeks ago about vocational programs or technical colleges where you’ve got this group of experts and you can batch this whole thing out to create marketing content.

Why is it important for the content to come from the people INSIDE your organization? Because it’s deepening your relationships with customers and patients and students and constituents of all kinds. It’s showing people, “Hey, this is who we are. This is how we share information. This is how we operate.” And allowing somebody to read that and go, “Hmmm, that kind of jives with my own personal life. I feel like I trust you, I want to, OK, I’ll spend my money with you instead of the folks down the road because their site looks like crap, or, it just doesn’t feel updated.”

Again, don’t forget re-purposing all of this content. Awhile back we talked about using it as a newsletter copy. So if you’ve got a newsletter email list and you struggle coming up with your weekly or monthly newsletter. “What am I going to write this month?” Use an interview process. Use Shortcut Blogging. You don’t even have to put it on your website. In fact we’ve got a service that’s a little less expensive than our full white glove service where we just give you the content.

We finish it up for you and rewrite it. If our editors know that it’s going into an email, they can write it that way. And all you have to do is polish it up, paste it into your auto responder as a broadcast message, and out it goes. You can schedule all those things in advance. So, there’s a lot of ways to use this particular approach in creating content. It just depends on what you want to do with the content.

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The Shortcut Blogging Method

Many of our posts, but not all of them, are created using the Shortcut Blogging method. Using the Shortcut method, we record an audio podcast, have the audio transcribed, then have the transcription written as a blog post. It's like magic. Our fingers never touch the keyboard.